03.08.2015

Engineer, physicist, and futurist Nikola Tesla(July 10, 1856–January 7, 1943) is among the most radical rule-breakers of science and is regarded by many as the greatest inventor in human history. His groundbreaking work paved the way for wireless communication and imprinted every electrical device we use today. Without Tesla, I wouldn’t be writing these words on this keyboard and you wouldn’t be reading them on this screen. But like all true geniuses, Tesla envisioned not only the practical applications of his inventions but the profound cultural shifts that any successful technology precipitates.

One of the most surprising, most obscure, yet most incisive of Tesla’s predictions peers into the future of society’s changing gender roles and considers how the advent of wireless technology would empower women, liberating us to develop our full intellectual potential repressed by the patriarchy for centuries.

In January of 1926, a reporter named John B. Kennedy interviewed Tesla about these very ideas. The piece was published in Colliers magazine under the title “When Woman Is Boss” and is discussed in Margaret Cheney’s excellent Tesla: Man Out of Time (public library), which remains the most insightful and dimensional perspective on the great inventor’s mind and spirit.

After reflecting on the future uses of wireless technology and practically predicting the iPhone, Tesla points to the empowerment of women as one of the most significant effects of technology on the world of tomorrow:

It is clear to any trained observer, and even to the sociologically untrained, that a new attitude toward sex discrimination has come over the world through the centuries, receiving an abrupt stimulus just before and after the World War.

This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior. The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race.

It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.

Tesla goes on to predict “the acquisition of new fields of endeavor by women” and “their gradual usurpation of leadership” as the inevitable result of that previously repressed potential, newly uncorked by the interconnectivity and educational empowerment that wireless technology would make possible:

Through countless generations, from the very beginning, the social subservience of women resulted naturally in the partial atrophy or at least the hereditary suspension of mental qualities which we now know the female sex to be endowed with no less than men. But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

Only a decade later, Hedy Lamarr — herself a brilliant inventor who paved the way for wifi — would prove Tesla right, as would the growing numbers of women who would enter STEM fields and take leadership positions in the generations to come. Exactly twenty years later, Einstein would echo Tesla’s prescient words in his heartening letter of advice to a little girl who wanted to be a scientist.